Current State of End-Game Contents - A Blog Post from A Japanese Player

[Orophin]

Ok, so I'm going to be the detractor here. I will preface this with some of his arguments are good, but many are a conflict of interest for the continued success (measured in subscriptions) for this game.

A mechanics-driven battle system

At this point (2.25), the current end-game content is the Second Coil of Bahamut. And the previous, first Binding Coil of Bahamut has been made so that even the so-called "mainstream" players can clear them without too much effort. Yes?

Let's take a look at the first Coil as an example:

In Turn 1, you no longer need to feed the slimes to Caduceus, so that's a huge easing of difficulty.
People were skipping slimes before the first patch. As long as you know the fight and outgear it over the bare minimum anyone could do this.


In Turn 2, Allagan Rot is (still) the faster method. However, anyone who cannot properly handle the mechanic will still die and possibly wipe the party. The mechanics has been eased to the point where even if one or two people mess up you may still be able to clear it. Nevertheless, the enrage method remains the mainstream strategy.
I feel that Turn 2 was the major roadblock to lesser skilled people progressing through Coil until the Enrage method was discovered.

In Turn 5, if you cannot deal with the mechanics of divebombs, twister, etc., you will not be able to win no matter what your character or equipment level is, with or without Echo. In fact, if your DPS is too high, you will actually run into trouble with Conflag/Fire Balls.
And this pretty much sets the trend for all the new turns of Coil, and maybe every piece of harder content equivalent to Coil going forward. (I don't think Primals or CT will ever fall under this category) This is also how I feel the cutting edge content should be until something comes out to replace it. People that have it on farm can still screw up occasionally, and it's both refreshing and frustrating to know that even if you know a fight inside out that it can still whip your ass sometimes.

The largest group here, the casual players, have all yet to still challenge the Extreme Primals and Coil. But the reality is that a large portion of this group have already stopped playing altogether.
So you're telling me nearly 60% of the playerbase have stopped playing by now? I find that kind of hard to believe. I'm in a FC full of what I would call "casual" people (I don't actually raid with them) and to this day, as a full FC, have never beaten Titan Ex. They just finally got their T5 kill a few days ago after finally putting some serious effort into it the past few weeks of a few hours a night 2-3 times a week, which isn't something a casual would typically do, but that's the kind of effort that has to be put forth if you're serious about beating something.

Right now they maybe put an hour's worth of attempts into Titan Ex and then give up. That's what casuals do. The people in my FC don't seem too concerned about being at the cutting edge of things, they just want to beat it eventually. They seem content enough doing atma farming, dungeons, gardening, all facets of what the game has to offer.

Changing the battle system

My recommendation is a battle system that does not rely on mechanics/gimmicks.

Turn 4 of the first Coil, prior to the nerf, had almost the perfect balance in terms of difficulty. It was built so that it can be cleared long as the players can fully exercise their skill potential, and is directly affected by measures such as the Echo and gear ilvl.
So essentially you want a battle system where you don't have to dodge anything? I guarantee you will lose far more players (your hardcores and your midcores) if you have a battle system like this because it will be bland and unimaginative. I hate to pull the FFXI card, (but it was already done in this post at one point) but it seems like you want a battle system that mocks FFXI where all you do is trade hits with a boss, heal through the damage, and occasionally use a devastating attack. FFXI had one of the most boring battle systems I've ever witnessed. Its only redeeming features were skillchains and magic bursts.

I'm not saying that gimmicks/mechanics are evil and should be removed completely, just that fights should not be “driven” by them. “Why not just make the boss or enemy simply strong?” is the basis of my recommendation.
That's exactly what you are saying though. I read this as you'd rather have a boss hit your tank for 75% of their health and put all the skill based play around your healers being able to precast/react around that. The wide array of abilities that a boss can use that affects the whole party is what I feel brings that certain level of challenge for the encounter. It's also what separates the good players from the bad, as one weak link will ruin you on the harder encounters.

Having more freedom in setting your own party size... or not
I don't think the development team quite understands just what made these contents so good for many players. And that is “as long as certain key jobs are in the party, you're more or less free to build the rest of the party any way you liked” (a FFXIV raid leader reading this is probably thinking “I wish!” right now)
FFXIV works the same way? You need tanks and healers, and a bard would be preferable. (sounds familiar...) Everything else is your choice, although there are certain setups that may work better for specific encounters, just like in FFXI.

Yoshi-P says “people get tired of contents after about 3 months”, and that's absolutely wrong. Everyone played these things for years at a time, and even the more recent Abyssea update had me playing for well over a year.
People played that content for years because it's all they knew. They had fun playing with their friends and continued to play the game. People that didn't enjoy this branched out and experienced new games like WoW and preferred its content that had less of a time investment for it. I can guarantee that this game will lose more people if all we had to do for a year was the first Binding Coil of Bahamut.

Now, what about the current FC/LS situation in FFXIV?

After each patch, you'll see your FC/LS's static teams in coil all day, and wonder whether anyone will even have time to talk to you.

If the system is changed so that more people can participate then you might have been able to go “Hey I just got here, let me join you guys!” (this wasn't easy to implement even in FFXI, but they did it)

The obstacle here (besides the obvious 8-man design limitation) is the instant death mechanics. As long as these mechanics exist, people will only want to play with those who won't make mistakes and would never want to *add* more people into their party.
I agree that I'd like to see larger party content other than CT and the two open world encounters that we have, but this isn't the obstacle. If WoW proved anything, you can carry less skilled people in content that required more people. The obstacle is the dev team afraid of taking a chance on making larger scale content because it will exclude smaller FCs that can't/aren't willing to branch out to other people to team up with to do it.

Weekly lockouts and other time-gate measures

There are a number of weekly lockouts in FFXIV, however, there are no attempt lockouts. You can try something for as many times as you want until you win. This is another factor that pushes the system towards being mechanics-driven.
If you want to implement something to drive away a large portion of your players, then this is the way to do it. FFXIV doesn't have an alternative like WoW's Heroic Raids for content. WoW has its normal difficulty that people can play through for the majority, while the minority of more skilled people could go through the Heroic raids with limited attempts, but the rewards are better. The common player simply wants to clear the content and may not even want to farm for gear. If you gate content behind a certain amount of attempts, you're going to lose your lesser skilled players (which make up the majority of the player base) simply because they can't experience it. You'd lose your Hardcores too who are trying to figure out mechanics for a fight because there's no alternative for them to do in the meantime.

To summarize, I feel this specific writer either can't handle mechanics themselves, or feel they're at the mercy of other players that can't, and want the battle system watered down to where it becomes so simple that people barely have to think or react. This might help lesser skilled/casual players get through the content faster, but on the same hand they'll be in the same boat as the hardcores (who will clear everything within the first week of it coming out) who get bored after doing content after so long.

(I notice I use "you" a lot in my post, it's not directed at the OP)

[Bizniztyme]

Ok, so I'm going to be the detractor here. I will preface this with some of his arguments are good, but many are a conflict of interest for the continued success (measured in subscriptions) for this game.













To summarize, I feel this specific writer either can't handle mechanics themselves, or feel they're at the mercy of other players that can't, and want the battle system watered down to where it becomes so simple that people barely have to think or react. This might help lesser skilled/casual players get through the content faster, but on the same hand they'll be in the same boat as the hardcores (who will clear everything within the first week of it coming out) who get bored after doing content after so long.

(I notice I use "you" a lot in my post, it's not directed at the OP)

Wow, couldnt have said it any better. You win this thread.

[Susanoh]

To summarize, I feel this specific writer either can't handle mechanics themselves, or feel they're at the mercy of other players that can't, and want the battle system watered down to where it becomes so simple that people barely have to think or react.

I took from this the complete opposite. The original author advocates dynamic fights, which would require more thought and reaction than what we have now. What he wants is less fights that require memorization to succeed, that are seemingly unforgiving to new players but are trivial and boring to players who already know the fight.

[Gormogon]

I wonder if SE will touch this subject between hardcore players that down content vs those that are struggling for 2.3 or their planned expansion in the upcoming live letter.

[Purplenum]

Wow, now that's a good translation!

I can't agree with this post more, it accurately describes what's wrong with this game and I'm glad someones finally been able to put it down in words.

[Rose-Wild]

It's funny when you find out that most of the people praising the OP are people who have not experienced the second coil.

[Jubez187]

Like I've said 100 times, this is the outcome of easy/simple class mechanics. You can type on google "(insert class) rotation FFXIV" and after some practice you're just as good AT THE CLASS as most people. You may not be able to dodge well, you may not be able to keep tracks of lots of things, but at its core, you are as good AT THE JOB as most people.

To make up for such easy class mechanics, you have to make the boss mechanics hard.

[Rose-Wild]

Like I've said 100 times, this is the outcome of easy/simple class mechanics. You can type on google "(insert class) rotation FFXIV" and after some practice you're just as good AT THE CLASS as most people. You may not be able to dodge well, you may not be able to keep tracks of lots of things, but at its core, you are as good AT THE JOB as most people.

To make up for such easy class mechanics, you have to make the boss mechanics hard.

There you go. Another one. I wonder why if the jobs are so easy to play why you can still find HUGE diferences between DPS's in the game or even tanks. Even in the fights that let you dps without having to move that much.

[Raenryong]

Laziness. Some people DON'T WANT to do the research. They don't wanna go on reddit and see the plethora of rotation guides. They don't parse and push themselves. That's why. Even at the end of the day though, knowing how to handle bosses is more important than handling the class. If you can dodge and pay attention to boss mechanics, and remember them well..you're a FFXIV God. It doesn't really matter about how well you manage CD's or how high your DPS is

That's completely untrue. A DPS who does poor DPS is horrible regardless of whether they survive or not. Not making a DPS check = wipe, no matter how well you dodge. There are also instances where a very high dps player can mess up, die, and still have the most damage at the end of the fight. A healer who can't heal but can dodge well ... you'll end up with a dead party.

[Renik]

Great post OP, unfortunately i have already lost my faith in the development team of ffixiv ARR, i always though this system was here just because of the little time they had to balance the game (the hardest duty), but every update have been disappointing and changed nothing, so looks like they will keep the battle this way.

This post missed a point, lack of hard/group and useful open world content, i can understand party limits (not restrictions) on instanced content, so a good way to make not limited party content would be useful open world endgame content, and those fight would also be free of unforgiving gimmicks.